Office Hours

Chapter 2: House Rules

Sunday dinners at her mother's house had a rhythm Temi could have performed in her sleep. Her mother, Yemisi, cooking enough for twelve when there were six of them. Her stepfather, Chuka, at the grill even in the cold because he refused to believe February counted as real winter. Bayo arguing with his younger stepsister Dara about whose turn it was to control the music. And Dele, always Dele, arriving twenty minutes early with flowers for her mother because he had understood, correctly, years ago, that the fastest way into this family was through Yemisi's approval.

"He's a keeper," her mother said for what had to be the four hundredth time, watching Dele help Chuka with the grill like he'd been doing it his whole life instead of two years. "You know how rare that is? A man who shows up early?"

"I know, Mom."

"You don't sound like you know."

Temi busied herself with the salad so she wouldn't have to answer that directly. Her mother had a gift for asking questions that sounded casual and landed like scalpel work.

The blended family had taken years to feel like a family and not like two households cautiously sharing a table. Temi still remembered being sixteen and resenting every single thing about the arrangement, the way Chuka's cooking took over the kitchen her father used to stand in, the way Bayo's easy laugh filled silences her own grief hadn't finished with yet. It had taken a long time, and a lot of quiet effort on everyone's part, to get here, to this table, to this ease. Temi had worked hard for this peace. She wasn't in a hurry to be the one who disturbed it.

Which was, she suspected, part of why she'd never once told any of them about Midnight Frequency, and part of why the small unhelpful flip her stomach had done in the quad two days ago felt less like excitement and more like a threat.

"You're quiet tonight," Dele said later, when they'd claimed the porch swing for themselves, her mother's dogs settling at their feet. He had his arm around her, warm and familiar, smelling like the same cologne he'd worn since sophomore year because he believed in consistency the way other people believed in astrology. "Long week?"

"New transfer student in my section. Bright kid. Keeps me on my toes."

"That's good, right? Keeps it interesting."

"Right," Temi said, and did not mention that the kid in question was, as of two days ago, also her stepbrother's roommate, and that she had spent an unreasonable amount of time since then thinking about a single sentence he'd said in the quad.

Dele shifted, and she felt the change in him before he spoke, the particular stillness he got when he was working up to something. "So, I talked to my mom this weekend. About maybe looking at places together next year. After you finish your program."

There it was. The next box in the sequence they'd built without ever quite discussing it out loud: dating, then exclusive, then meeting the parents, then, apparently, moving in.

"That's a big step," Temi said carefully.

"It's the natural step," Dele said, easy, certain, the way he was certain about most things involving them, because in four years he had never once had reason not to be. "We've been together three years, Temi. I'm not saying tomorrow. I'm saying it's time to start thinking about it."

"I hear you," she said, which was true and also, she recognized with some discomfort, one of those sentences that lived in the gap between honesty and avoidance she'd gotten so good at building.

He kissed her temple, satisfied, already moving on to some story about his coworker, and Temi sat there with the dogs warm against her ankles and her mother's laugh drifting out from the kitchen and felt, for the first time in a long while, genuinely unsure whether the life laid out in front of her was one she wanted or just one she had never questioned.

"You're doing the thing," Aro said Tuesday night, cueing up the next segment with one hand and pointing at her with the other. "The thing where you go quiet in your face but loud in your knee."

Temi looked down. Her knee was, in fact, bouncing. She stilled it. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Six years of friendship, Temi. I know your tells." He leaned back in his chair, studio lights throwing soft shadows across the boards and stickers and years of accumulated show ephemera on the walls. "Dele again?"

"Sort of." She hesitated, then, because it was Aro, because the studio was the one place she never quite managed to lie in, even off air, she told him. About the apartment conversation. About the strange hollow feeling that followed it, one she couldn't fully explain even to herself.

Aro listened the way he always did, without rushing her, without offering an opinion before she was done needing to talk. When she finished he was quiet a moment, turning a pen over in his fingers.

"Can I say something and have you not take it the wrong way?"

"You're going to say it either way."

"Fair." A small smile, gone quickly. "You've never once, in six years, talked about your future with Dele the way you talk about your future period. Like, career stuff, you light up. This show, you light up. Dele, you get this look like you're reading a very reasonable, very boring instruction manual."

"That's not fair."

"Maybe not. I'm just telling you what I see." He held her gaze a beat longer than the conversation strictly required, then looked back at the board, clearing his throat. "Anyway. Two minutes to air. You want the mic or you want to keep having a whole crisis first?"

"I hate you a little."

"You love me a normal, healthy amount," Aro said. "Two minutes."

Temi pulled her headphones on and let the studio do what it always did, take the tangled parts of her day and give her somewhere to set them down for two hours. She didn't let herself think about Aro's face when he'd said you light up, or about the fact that he hadn't been wrong, or about a boy named Kairo who'd told her everybody has secrets like he already suspected hers ran deeper than most.

She had rules. She had built them carefully, over years, for good reasons.

She just wasn't entirely sure, tonight, that the rules were still doing what she needed them to do.